December 22, 2014 Jim Hood Mississippi Attorney General Walter
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December 22, 2014 Jim Hood Mississippi Attorney General Walter Sillers Building 550 High Street, Suite 1200 Jackson, MS 39201 Dear Attorney General Hood: According to recent news reports, your office, in active coordination with the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) and its member companies, has been and remains engaged in a coordinated campaign to shut down and block access to individual websites through backdoor methods resoundingly rejected by the public and federal lawmakers. Publications including the New York Times, the Huffington Post, and The Verge are reporting that the MPAA responded to the failure of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in 2012 by quietly searching for alternate means to accomplish key provisions of the bill, such as website blocking and search filtering. It is our understanding that those efforts include developing legal theories and even drafting civil investigation demand letters for state attorneys general to facilitate actions against websites and search engines. The goal of these efforts mirrors the goal of SOPA: to create new legal tools that will compel online service providers to remove content from the Internet with little, if any, meaningful due process. While we recognize these reports may be incomplete, the available information nevertheless leaves us deeply concerned. As demonstrated in the debate over SOPA, compelled website blocking by online service providers poses an unjustifiable threat to the security of the Domain Name System (DNS), the basic address book of the Internet. Similarly, requiring third parties to filter the contents of DNS lookups and search results threatens the Internet as a tool and forum for free expression. Despite these risks, you told the Huffington Post you agreed with the methods of the illfated SOPA legislation. We beg to differ, as do the engineers who created the Internet, the organizations and businesses that depend upon a secure and robust Internet infrastructure, and the legions of Internet users who spoke out against SOPA in 2011 and 2012. When Congress tried to pass SOPA in 20112012, millions of Americans signed petitions, called and emailed their Congressional representatives, and commented on social media platforms, all firmly opposing attempts to limit online speech by blocking websites without appropriate legal process. SOPA was a bad idea at the federal level, and any SOPA revival on a state level is an equally bad idea that, we are confident, will be equally unacceptable to the public. We have included several letters highlighting the original opposition to SOPA to remind you of the depth of the problems with this approach and the principled opposition to curtailing free speech that it first provoked. Sincerely, American Library Association Center for Democracy and Technology Computer and Communications Industry Association Consumer Electronics Association Demand Progress Electronic Frontier Foundation Engine Advocacy Free Press FreedomWorks New America’s Open Technology Institute Public Knowledge R StreetRootstrikers Public Interest Groups Letter November 15, 2011 The Honorable Lamar Smith Chairman Committee on the Judiciary 2138 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 The Honorable John Conyers, Jr. Ranking Member Committee on the Judiciary 2138 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Re: H.R. 3261, the Stop Online Piracy Act Dear Chairman Smith and Ranking Member Conyers, The undersigned advocates and organizations write to express our deep concern with H.R. 3261, the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (SOPA). While we support appropriate copyright enforcement and want to ensure that creators around the world have the opportunity to be compensated for their works, SOPA as constructed would come at too high a cost to Internet communication and noninfringing online expression. The bill would set an irreversible precedent that encourages the fracturing of the Internet, undermines freedom of expression worldwide, and has numerous other unintended and harmful consequences. We do not dispute that there are hubs of online infringement. But the definitions of the sites that would be subject to SOPA’s remedies are so broad that they would encompass far more than those bad actors profiting from infringement. By including all sites that may – even inadvertently – “facilitate” infringement, the bill raises serious concerns about overbreadth. Under section 102 of the bill, a nondomestic startup videosharing site with thousands of innocent users sharing their own noninfringing videos, but a small minority who use the site to criminally infringe, could find its domain blocked by U.S. DNS operators. Countless noninfringing videos from the likes of aspiring artists, proud parents, citizen journalists, and human rights activists would be unduly swept up by such an action. Furthermore, overreach resulting from bill is more likely to impact the operators of smaller websites and services that do not have the legal capacity to fight false claims of infringement. Relying on an even broader definition of “site dedicated to theft of US property,” section 103 of SOPA creates a private right of action of breathtaking scope. Any rightsholder could cut off the financial lifeblood of services such as search engines, usergenerated content platforms, social media, and cloudbased storage unless those services actively monitor and police user activity to the rightsholder’s satisfaction. A mere accusation by any rightsholder would be sufficient to require payment systems and ad networks to terminate doing business with the service; the accused service’s only recourse would be to send a counternotice, at which point it would be at the networks’ discretion whether to reinstate the service’s access to payments and advertising. This would bypass and effectively overturn the basic framework of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), by pushing userdriven sites like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook to implement evermore elaborate monitoring systems to “confirm,” to the satisfaction of the most aggressive and litigious rightsholder, whether individual users are exchanging infringing content. These and other sites have flourished under the DMCA safe harbor, which provides certainty concerning the legal responsibilities of online service providers and expressly rejects a de facto legal obligation to actively track and police user behavior. Creating such an obligation would be hugely damaging to Internet innovation, particularly for smaller, emerging sites and individuals. It would also carry major consequences for users’ legitimate privacy interests. We also have serious concerns about the inclusion the provisions in section 102 to require ISPs to filter Domain Name System (DNS) requests or otherwise try to “prevent access” to targeted websites.1 DNSfiltering is trivial to circumvent and will be ineffective at stopping infringement. Where it does have an impact, that effect is likely to be overbroad, sweeping in legitimate online content. We have witnessed this already in the case of mooo.com, the seizure of which led to upwards of 84,000 innocent subdomains being blocked.2 In addition, mandated filtering would undermine the U.S. government’s commitment to advancing a single, global Internet. Its inclusion risks setting a precedent for other countries, even democratic ones, to use the same mechanisms to enforce a range of domestic policies, effectively balkanizing the global medium of the Internet. Simply declaring that filtering aimed at copyright and trademark infringement is different from filtering with more sinister motives does not change the message this would send to the world – that the United States is legitimizing methods of online censorship to enforce its domestic laws. Nondemocratic regimes could seize on the precedent to justify measures that would hinder online freedom of expression and association. DNSfiltering also raises very real cybersecurity concerns.3 It conflicts with Secure DNS (DNSSEC), and circumventing the filters will risk making domestic networks and users more vulnerable to cybersecurity attacks and identity theft as users migrate to offshore DNS providers not subject to filtering orders. Given the ease with which DNS filters can be circumvented, there is strong reason to doubt that its benefits are worth these costs. The undersigned organizations recognize the importance of addressing truly illicit behavior online. We share the overall goals of many of SOPA’s supporters – preventing largescale commercial infringement and ensuring that creativity and expression thrive. Intellectual property infringement breaks the law online or off, but SOPA is not the right way to stop it. Current enforcement mechanisms were designed to avoid the countervailing harms of conscripting intermediaries into being points of control on the Internet and deciding what is and what is not copyrightinfringing expression. As drafted, SOPA radically alters digital copyright policy in ways that will be detrimental to online expression, innovation, and security. Sincerely, American Library Association Association of Research Libraries Center for Democracy & Technology Competitive Enterprise Institute Demand Progress Electronic Frontier Foundation Freedom House Human Rights First Human Rights Watch Internews New America Foundation’s Open Technology Initiative Public Knowledge TechFreedom 1 These concerns also apply to the DNS Filtering provisions included S. 968, the Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual